Inside the New York Yankees clubhouse with MLB.com beat writer Bryan Hoch.

Wang to have season-ending surgery

Chien-Ming Wang will have arthroscopic surgery on his right shoulder capsule on Wednesday under the care of Dr. James Andrews and will miss the remainder of the 2009 season.

The Yankees hurler had a MRI Monday in Birmingham, Ala. and met with Andrews on Tuesday. Yankees manager Joe Girardi said that the team has no time frame on how long Wang will need to recover.

“It’s a tough loss for us,” Girardi said. “I feel for him, because he’s been through a lot in the last 14 or 15 months, with the [right] foot injury and now this. Hopefully this will be the end of the surgeries for him and he will have the rest of his career to be healthy.”

It’s really bad for Chien-Ming Wang. I truly hope that he will recover well from this and that it won’t be too much affecting his career. Still, we have to admit that for this season he’s never been one you could really trust while on the mound. He hasn’t pitched better than Hughes or Mitre.

Well I’m starting to feel less confident that the Yankees will make a move for a serviceable 5th starter, one that would be a definite upgrade over Sergio Mitre, after waking up this morning and hearing about the 2 trades that happened last night/early this morning: Cliff Lee to the Phillies and Ian Snell to the Mariners. I’m still hoping they don’t go after Washburn though…

With this latest news about Wang, and the recent slide of the M’s, it’s been reported that Seattle is going into seller mode and that Washburn can be had, that they’ve notified the Yankees about this. Washburn might be having a solid year, but I really think it would be a bad move to go after him. Other than 2005, Washburn hasn’t pitched a full season where his ERA is less than 4.30 since 2002. For 7 years he has been an average-solid starter, but nothing to write home about. This year he’s having an extremely solid year, but has he improved so much from the past 7 years of mediocrity to this 1 of being solid, that he should be traded for 2 upper-tiered prospects? I think it would be a bad move for the Yankees, they would add another arm to the starting rotation along the lines of Andy Pettitte. 2 softer throwing lefties in the same rotation sounds like a bad combination in the AL East (I seriously think in the AL East that Washburn’s stats would be closer to Andy Pettitte’s as well, maybe a little better though).

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